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Questions Congress Should Ask CFPB Director Next Week

CFPB Director Kathy Kraninger will deliver the statutory “Semi-Annual Report of the CFPB” to the House Financial Services (10/16) and Senate Banking (10/17) Committees next week. Here are some helpful questions for committee members to ask.

Ed oversees U.S. PIRG’s federal consumer program, helping to lead national efforts to improve consumer credit reporting laws, identity theft protections, product safety regulations and more. Ed is co-founder and continuing leader of the coalition, Americans For Financial Reform, which fought for the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, including as its centerpiece the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He was awarded the Consumer Federation of America's Esther Peterson Consumer Service Award in 2006, Privacy International's Brandeis Award in 2003, and numerous annual "Top Lobbyist" awards from The Hill and other outlets. Ed lives in Virginia, and on weekends he enjoys biking with friends on the many local bicycle trails.

CFPB Director Kathy Kraninger will deliver the statutory “Semi-Annual Report of the CFPB” to the House Financial Services (10/16) and Senate Banking (10/17) Committees next week.

On the House FSC website the hearing is labeled “Who Is Standing Up for Consumers?”

It’s a good question. Since Director Kraninger took the reins from interim director Mick Mulvaney late last year, many of her actions have served industry, not consumer, interests. While she has reached out to consumer advocates, including me, her actions speak louder than words.

Here are more questions about recent CFPB actions committee members should ask the director:

Why Have You Joined Bureau Opponents in Claiming Your Position Is Unconstitutional?

U.S. PIRG has long defended the constitutionality of the CFPB’s structure. To ensure that this independent consumer protection agency did not become a political arm of the administration, any administration, its enabling statute followed longstanding Supreme Court precedent by wisely providing that its director could only be removed by the president for cause. In September, Kraninger reversed the CFPB’s litigation posture and joined the Trump administration as well as industry groups in arguing that the CFPB’s structure is unconstitutional. Her action also left the CFPB without a government defender, so leadership of the House of Representatives has petitioned the Supreme Court to reject the administration’s, and now the CFPB’s, position.

U.S. PIRG and other researchers have repeatedly found that debt collector practices are abusive, including toward consumers who never owed or no longer owe a debt. In response to a request for comments on a CFPB proposal to make it easier for collectors to contact consumers more often and through more channels, including by unlimited texts and emails, U.S. PIRG and state PIRGs joined other advocates in a series of subject-based comments. The comment letters are on issues ranging from general debt collection problems to medical debt, privacy and student loan debt. The CFPB's proposal has many more implications than merely allowing collectors to bombard debtors and other consumers with more calls and unlimited emails and texts. For example, instead of barring the collection of time-barred debt, an area rife with abuse, the proposal provides legal protections to collectors that will serve to increase their use of unfair and deceptive practices.

Why Aren’t You Returning More Money to Victims?

Research by the Consumer Federation of America and others has documented a stark decline in CFPB enforcement actions, in the size of penalties imposed and in the amount of restitution returned to consumer-victims of financial schemes. This sends the wrong message that cheating consumers is just a cost of doing business, not wrongdoing that should be punished. Effective enforcement should end unfair practices, deter others from taking up the same practices, punish the wrongdoers and make victims whole. It’s not hard to do it right. Doing it wrong promotes wrongdoing.

How Will Your Emphasis on Consumer Education Put Money Back in Consumer Pockets?

The CFPB already had a significant consumer education program when Director Kraninger arrived. Many have questioned her doubling-down on financial education, especially while she simultaneously energizes payday lenders, reduces enforcement and unleashes debt collectors. As professor Lauren Willis has pointed out: “Replacing regulation and enforcement with websites and e-alerts relieves lenders of their responsibilities — in effect protecting industry rather than consumers. […] Financial products today are complex and ever-changing. […] This is why Congress created the CFPB to be an agency with the resources, expertise, and rulemaking and enforcement powers necessary to protect consumers in the 21st century. The agency’s leader needs a strategy that reflects this mission, not the fantasy that financial education will protect us.”

Sadly, the answer to the question, “Who Is Standing Up for Consumers?” does not appear to be the current CFPB. That CFPB has forgotten that it was established as the only federal agency with just one job: protecting financial consumers in a dangerous marketplace full of tricks and traps. It should get back to doing that one job. Congressional oversight is needed to hold the Bureau accountable to its mission.

Ed oversees U.S. PIRG’s federal consumer program, helping to lead national efforts to improve consumer credit reporting laws, identity theft protections, product safety regulations and more. Ed is co-founder and continuing leader of the coalition, Americans For Financial Reform, which fought for the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, including as its centerpiece the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He was awarded the Consumer Federation of America's Esther Peterson Consumer Service Award in 2006, Privacy International's Brandeis Award in 2003, and numerous annual "Top Lobbyist" awards from The Hill and other outlets. Ed lives in Virginia, and on weekends he enjoys biking with friends on the many local bicycle trails.